I’ve been working on a paper — since I’ve long tabled the idea of a future in academia, or scholarship, I have only a few projects I want to get done in substitution — to expand the work of Paul Feyerabend into a political philosophy. Feyerabend’s primary discipline was the philosophy of science and epistemology, where he considered his central thesis to be “methodological” or “epistemological anarchism.”

His dialogues, essays, and lengthier expositions of (sometimes called) “epistemological Dadaism” can be roughly summed up as

For any scientific conclusion C, there is no one route from empirical premises P.

“Scientific” here being widely inclusive and contemporary with social standards, as a function of Feyerabend’s opposition to positivism. The hubbub of observation statements, empirical tests, auxiliary hypotheses, inferences, axioms, etc. that govern a research programme are only one possible set of multiple that have historically yielded similarly sanctified discoveries. For any B, there is no single route from A. Describing the scientific method as a route of Popperian falsification, for instance, cuts out Galileo, or cuts out Einstein, he would argue.

Feyerabend swore off the doctrine of political anarchism as a cruel system, although he was often inspired by revolutionary anarchists like Bakunin. Even still, his philosophy lends support for social power decentralization in general — even with sometimes grotesque deviations like his support for government suppression of academic inquiry.

I’ll be working on the paper on this, but in lieu of that, I think the primary connection between Feyerabend’s work on epistemology and a potential work in political science is the support of his epistemological thesis — for any scientific conclusion C, there is no one route from empirical premises P — for a broader methodological statement, namely, that for any outcome C, there is no one route from starting point A. For politics, this could mean:

For any social-organizational outcome O, there is no one route from given state of nature N.

Where “route” can clearly apply to ranges of government involvement, or zero government involvement. Feyerabend’s writings do not support this liberal of a reading in general, but in a constrained domain of social organization and especially knowledge-sharing (he was keen on dissolving hierarchies for their disruption of information), there might be a lot of connection to unearth.

This is, again, part of a larger project to bring Feyerabend more into the liberty spectrum — his writings are hosted on marxists.org, after all — or at least on the radar for inspiration. I’ll be posting more, and hopefully defending it, in the future.